Building trust in organic Search Engine Optimisation

Trust is the cornerstone of all good relationships, particularly those online. The search engines have to trust your content to be able to recommend your website to the traffic that is searching on them. Trust forms the basic requirement of achieving strong search engine positions, without trust the search engines will not reward your website with strong positions, fact.

Trust is earned in many ways, it is also in part assumed in that if the trust is broken through bad practices or unavailability, then penalties can mean that it takes some time to get the trust back. Basing search engine performance on trust is pure logic, when working for clients it is vital that they are represented in an ethical way to ensure that the trust flows!

Building trust in organic Search Engine Optimisation

The most important trust building consideration is ensuring that your content appears natural. The search engines have evolved to be highly sophisticated spam detectors, they assess not only how well optimised a website is for search queries, but also whether it is over-optimised. Appearing to be trying to create advantage for particular search queries is counter-productive and will more than likely have a negative effect on positions.

Ensuring that the website is set-up to best carry the content is the basis of trust building. This means that each page has unique meta data, because each page is unique. The meta data should be well written and not be stuffed full of keywords – the over-use of comma’s is a red flag to the search engines that spamming may be going on.

The page content should be engaging, the search engines quickly build trust if pages are digested (this is determined from the time on the page and how it is interacted), engaging sites are clearly of value to users, this helps the search engines determine how useful they may be to others. Naturally written, informative content is the most engaging, including website video and imagery to break up words further enhances this.

Content Marketing and trust

Google have changed the way that they handle poor quality content marketing, in that they discount it, rather than penalising. This is a good thing since the rise of negative search engine optimisation – the process of deliberately spamming another website to cause penalty. Even though Google’s disavow tool facilitates the uncoupling of a website from bad content, it is an additional process that takes time before damage can be undone.

It is clear that the overall volume of links coming into a website should be of good standing and that the traffic that flows via these links should be engaging to build trust. This means that content that is available on third party sites, linked to your website, should be unique, relevant and engaging and not deemed to be spam. 

A good content marketing strategy helps to build website trust. Combined with engaging landing page design, this will ultimately help lead to improved visibility for your content within organic search engine results pages.

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